The tech giant has handed out a straight-to-series, two-season order for Central Park, an animated musical comedy from Bob's Burgers creator Loren Bouchard, the show's Emmy winner Nora Smith and Josh Gad (Frozen).

The animated musical series tells the story of how a family of caretakers, who live and work in Central Park, end up saving the park — and basically the world. The series features a star-studded voice cast that includes Gad, Leslie Odom Jr. (Hamilton), Titus Burgess (Netflix's Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), Kristen Bell (The Good Place), Stanley Tucci (Feud), Daveed Diggs (Hamilton, Snowpiercer) and Kathryn Hahn (Amazon's I Love Dick). The Central Park order is for 13-episodes per season (26 total).

Bouchard and Gad will pen the script and exec produce; Smith will serve as a consultant. Kevin Larsen, who was instrumental in putting the project together, will produce. Brillstein Entertainment Partners will also exec produce the comedy. The series hails from 20th Century Fox Television, which produces animated hits Bob's Burgers, The Simpsons, Family Guy and American Dad, among others. The Apple show is key sale for the studio, which is on the verge of being sold to Disney as part of the latter's larger $52 billion deal.

Central Park becomes the latest animated series to score a sizable order as the genre, sources say, is poised to see an explosion in the coming months as streaming outlets like Netflix, Amazon and more build up their content in the space. Amazon recently handed out a straight-to-series order for Undone, from the team behind Netflix's BoJack Horseman as its first animated series and the latter went straight to series for Tuca and Bertie featuring Tiffany Haddish voicing one of the leads. For Netflix, Tuca joins a roster of adult-themed animated comedies that also includes a two-season, 20-episode order for Disenchantment, from Simpsons mastermind Matt Groening, BoJack, F is for Family and more.

For its part, Bob's Burgers has become a cornerstone of Fox's Sunday animated lineup. The comedy, currently in its eighth season, won the Emmy last year for best animated series. An animated feature film, also from Bouchard is in the works for a July 2020 debut.

For Apple, Central Park becomes the tech giant's latest scripted foray. It joins a slate that also includes an untitled thriller from M. Night Shyamalan; Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon's morning news drama; a mystery series from La La Land's Damien Chazelle; Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories anthology (which is looking for a new showrunner after Bryan Fuller's exit); Octavia Spencer's Are You Sleeping (in development); a comedy starring Kristin Wiig; a space drama from Battlestar Galactica's Ron Moore; Steven Knight's world-building See; and unscripted docuseries Home. Still to be determined is just how Apple will unspool these shows.

Rachael Taylor breaks down Trish Walker's turbulent journey through the second year of Marvel's Netflix drama.

[This story contains major spoilers for season two of Marvel's Jessica Jones.]

For Rachael Taylor's Trish Walker, the second season of Jessica Jones was all kinds of "cray cray."

Creator and showrunner Melissa Rosenberg's Marvel series, which debuted its entire second season March 8 on Netflix, sees the celebrity occasionally known as Patsy sinking deeper and deeper into darkness: relapsing into addiction through the use of a power-enhancing inhaler, as one example, breaking off a serious relationship and abandoning her daytime talk show due to career dissatisfaction as another. It all builds toward Trish's central desire: to become a hero, just like Jessica.

With that in mind, the final stretch of season two sees Trish setting out to gain powers of her own — a quest that nearly ends in her own death, and very much does end in the death of Alisa (Janet McTeer), Jessica's inadvertently monstrous mother, gunned down in cold blood by none other than Trish. Alisa's death is a shocking moment both in the context of the otherwise peaceful and somber scene, and also in what it means for the show's central relationship between Jessica and Trish moving forward. As Jessica says in the final minutes of the season, every time she looks at Trish moving forward, all she will see is the woman who killed her mother.

For their part, Jessica Jones viewers will likely see the same thing in Trish as what the title character sees — but they also see something more, now that the former host of "Trish Talk" is starting to exhibit powers of her own. The catlike reflexes demonstrated in Trish's final scene are an obvious nod to the character's roots as the Marvel superhero Hellcat, a development one hopes and expects to see expanded upon in a likely third season.

Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Rachael Taylor opened up about Trish's rocky road through the second season of Jessica Jones, how her storyline mirrored the #MeToo movement and the pitfalls of celebrity at points, the violent twist in the season finale, and more… beginning with the "cray cray" beginning.

Let's start with the earliest point in which we see Trish, even if it comes about halfway into the season: "AKA I Want Your Cray Cray," the seventh episode of the season, which flashes back to who Jessica and Trish were long before we met them. For Trish, she's just branched out into pop music, and is celebrating the release of the song from which the episode gets its name…

It's a sufficiently addictive song. Good luck getting it out of your head. It took me three or four months to shed it. (Laughs.) But I think episode seven is my favorite episode of the season. I feel like season two is really all about diving deeper and darker into the personal histories and personal traumas of all of our characters. Getting a direct window into a very different version of Trish Walker was very exciting. For the first five or six episodes, Trish is going in a number of different directions, in terms of her appetite for wanting "more." There's nothing she's not prepared to do to feel more powerful or be closer to Jessica, and for me, episode seven is a window into why she's the way she is. She's been made to feel in her life that she was not respected. She was an addict. It emotionally explains a lot about what season two is, up to that point. Does that make sense?

It does, because Trish certainly goes through the wringer in season two: career growing pains, relapse through the inhaler, her shifting friendship with Jessica — especially given the ending of the season — and seemingly developing some powers of her own.

We really had to break her down in order to eventually, hopefully, build her back up. I love playing a character who on the surface seems very polished. You can look at her on one hand and think, "She really has it all. She has a radio show, she has a relative degree of fame due to her career as a child star, she has money…" But she also has a gaping hole in her, a yearning to be more than she is. She wants to be taken seriously. It's just not happening, particularly as a journalist. She's tired of towing the corporate line at Trish Talk. She wants to matter. That was the key to her for me this season, playing with the varying shades of how she wants to matter. By the end of the season, it coagulates into her one true desire: her desire for powers. For the first few episodes, her desire for more keeps changing. She wants to be a journalist, she wants to help people, she wants to help Jessica… all of that is true, but at the end of the season, we see that what she really wants is to be a superhero. She wants to be like Jessica.

Did that feel true to what you believed about Trish, having played her in the first season of Jessica Jones and also in The Defenders — that everything was building toward her desire to help people in such an external way?

It took on a different shape than I thought it would take on. I always felt from the very beginning, even from the first episode of season one, that Trish was a very earnest character. She really wants to save the world. She's quite serious about that intention. There's an appetite to her, even in season one, where she errs on the side of being more supportive of Jessica and doesn't take it to as dark a place as she does in season two. I always felt she was a character with an unholy ambition, and an envy of Jessica that was right under the surface. It doesn't cancel out her deep love and loyalty to her friend, but I could always see shades of her feeling less than.

How did you feel about the show's depiction of celebrity through Trish? There's a scene near the end of the season in which a fan wants to pose for a picture with Trish, and Trish is not having it, for instance…

I did a lot of research into the experience of being a child star, because that's not my experience. In reading about it and using my own imagination, I put a lot of attention to the idea: "What is it like to be world famous at the time you're eight? And what's it like to see that attention ebb and flow? Where does the frustration build for the character, and feed into the one idea of needing to matter?" She has a lot of shame about her celebrity. I really liked the way Melissa Rosenberg has written Trish being 99% polite with her fans. (Laughs.) She's a good sport, most of the time. This is her language. She doesn't know better than needing to be polite to people as she walks down the street. That's how she's operated in the world since she was a kid. But I love how season two starts to show that fracture, her desire for power becoming greater than what she's always known.

What was your reaction when you realized Jessica Jones was paralleling the Me Too movement early on in the season, with Trish's history with a Hollywood executive — a storyline that was written and shot months before the movement began?

Krysten [Ritter], Carrie-Anne [Moss] and I were all texting each other back and forth: "Wow. I guess what we put on the screen months ago has now become incredibly timely." I think it speaks to Melissa's ability to relay what's going on in culture and the female experience in an authentic and honest way. Our show has always had this theme of female empowerment and how women use their voices, and how women take up space in the world, and how women seek agency, and the complications of what happens when they get it. That's been the undercurrent of the show since its inception. If we can contribute to any of these conversations, Me Too and Time's Up, in any way? That's something I'm very proud of. I'm very proud to be part of a show that holds up a mirror for our times. I definitely see that it's more timely now than ever.

The season focuses on Jessica's relationship with her mother — a relationship that ends when Trish pulls the trigger on Alisa. What was your reaction when you found out about Trish's role in killing Jessica's mom?

Our show doesn't have binary ideas of good and bad. In some respects, my favorite thing about season two is that while Alisa is the big bad, every character is wrestling with the monster within. It's more complicated than there being one bad guy. One view is that Trish is not always the good girl in this season. There are shades of her compromising Jessica and causing her pain. For me, the through line was always that Trish wanted to save Jessica in the way Jessica has saved Trish in the past. At any cost, really. It doesn't matter that she knows it will cause Jessica great pain. The overriding drive is that Trish has to save Jessica. As an actor, I can see both arguments: I can see how Alisa was a danger to Jessica and Trish was only trying to help, and I can see how Trish is inserting herself into Jessica's life and only wanting to matter and play the hero. There are a couple of takes on it. I love that about our show. Our characters' motivations are not always simple. They often have more than one desire or drive operating at the same time. It's like a playground for an actor.

What do you hope is next for Trish, now that she has her own powers, and now that she's so estranged from Jessica?

When we were shooting season two, one of the things I landed on is that you fall in love with your character as an actor. You want to protect them. But season two was about not protecting Trish. I had to break her down in order to try to build her back up. She derails at a number of moments, which is super fun to play, but in season three, I want her to reconnect with Jessica and get back on the same page. I love the big and rich scenes I get to play with Krysten Ritter; I've learned so much from working with her. The female friendship between Trish and Jessica is the heartbeat of the show. I love that we bring a friendship to the screen that's not a sanitized version of female friendship. It's messy and complicated. To some degree, they want what the other one has. For Trish, there are shades of jealousy, and I think that's the case for Jessica as well. I don't think I'll ever get tired of going deeper into that friendship.

What did you think of Trish's arc in season two? Sound off in the comments below, and keep following our Jessica Jones coverage for more season two stories.

The AMC zombie drama looks to be setting up another series regular's departure.

[This story contains spoilers for season eight, episode eleven of AMC's The Walking Dead, as well as the comic books from Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard on which the show is based.]

"They don't scare."

That's what Steven Ogg's Simon says, speaking in a sneak peek at the next episode of Walking Dead, called "The Key." The hour looks to focus on the escalating conflict between the Alexandria Safe-Zone and the Saviors, with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) recently deciding upon an unconventional tactic to take out his enemies: germ warfare, as in outfitting his troops' weapons with zombie gore for the purpose of infection.

There's one massive problem with Negan's plan, however: loyalty. Namely, the most loyal people in his army don't have any. He's lucky that Eugene (Josh McDermitt) has remained so steadfast across the last season and change, as the comic book version of the character offers no support whatsoever to the King of the Saviors; his turn in the TV show feels inevitable, if slower. Likewise, this past week's episode brought Dwight (Austin Amelio) back under Negan's employ, even though the scarred Savior is fully Team Alexandria at this point in the comics and very likely in the show as well.

Dwight and Eugene's true loyalties shouldn't come as a shock, but the big kicker is the one that's only recently started coming to light: Simon, the wild-eyed killer who viewers first met in the season six finale, "Last Day on Earth." Whether it's his handlebar mustache, the way he puffs his chest out and towers over everyone he comes across, or the slow yet decisive manner in which he speaks, Simon has swiftly become one of the most memorable characters in the entire Walking Dead show's lore, let alone in recent memory.

But it's starting to very much look like Simon will soon be nothing more than a memory, given the trajectory of the storyline. Two episodes earlier, Simon viciously disagreed with Negan on his plans to instill some fear and loyalty from his dissenters, instead taking matters into his own hands when he slaughtered all of the Garbage People, save for Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh). What's more, Simon lied about killing the scavengers when he spoke with Negan, following the grisly act. Something dark is stirring within the man Negan trusts most, in other words, and it's going to manifest as soon as next week's episode.

Watch the official preview for "The Key," in which Simon and the Saviors travel toward the Hilltop:

Next week's episode sees Simon, Dwight and others traveling toward the Hilltop with murder on their minds, albeit a limited amount of murder. In a sneak peek of the episode, a conversation between Simon and Dwight makes it clear that Negan wants the standard procedure followed: just enough damage to scare Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and the others into submission. During their talk, Simon makes his conclusion about Rick's people known: no matter what they throw at the Alexandrians, they don't get scared — implying that the only way to win the war is total annihilation.

Of course, Simon's talking to the wrong guy when it comes to this pitch. Dwight wants to win the war, and he wants Alexandria standing at the end of it. Is he positioned to sell out Simon to Negan, in order to get closer to the Saviors' boss once again? Negan's still trying to ferret out a traitor, after all, and if Dwight can compellingly make the case for Simon — who at the very least outright betrayed Negan's desires on his most recent mission, and fully lied about it — then perhaps a major power shift within the agency is about to commence.

Whether or not Dwight's involved, it feels like Simon's already short fuse is about to burn out. It's hard to imagine the character deceiving Negan and getting away with it. Simon is a character invented purely for the show, so there's no comic book road map to gauge in terms of his future within the series. However, comic book readers know that Negan does in fact survive the coming war, and is destined to spend the next several years of his life rotting away in an Alexandria jail cell. If Simon dies on the show, is it a twist designed to soften the blow if Negan manages to survive season eight, much like his comic book counterpart?

However it shakes out, if you're a fan of Steven Ogg's magnetic turn as Simon, enjoy every moment with the mad man you have from here on out. At any time, it could be his last.

Watch Simon and Dwight debate the Saviors' tactics in the video below:

What do you think will happen to Simon? Sound off in the comments and keep checking THR.com/WalkingDead for more coverage.

British Prime Minister Theresa May told members of the Parliament today that it was "highly likely" Russia was responsible for poisoning Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England earlier this month.

She said Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, were exposed to a "military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia." They were found slumped over in Salisbury, England, last week, and remained in critical condition.

May told members of Parliament that British authorities had concluded the Skripals were exposed to an agent that was part of the "Novichok" group of nerve agents developed by Russia.

Because Russia had produced the agent in the past and "would still be capable of doing so," it had sponsored assassinations before, and it saw some defectors as legitimate targets, the British government had "concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal," May said.

"Either this was a direct act by the Russian state against our country," May added, "or the Russian government lost control of its potentially catastrophically damaging nerve agent and allowed it to get into the hands of others."

The British foreign secretary has summoned the Russian ambassador to the United Kingdom to the British foreign ministry "and asked him to explain which of these two possibilities it is," May said. The foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, has requested a response by the end of Tuesday.

"Should there be no credible response, we will conclude that this action amounts to an unlawful use of force by the Russian State against the United Kingdom," May said.

May laid out a history of what she called "Russian state aggression" — from annexing the territory of Crimea from Ukraine to a recent speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin where he unveiled weapons systems.

"This attempted murder using a weapons-grade nerve agent in a British town was not just a crime against the Skripals," May said. "It was an indiscriminate and reckless act against the United Kingdom, putting the lives of innocent civilians at risk. And we will not tolerate such a brazen attempt to murder innocent civilians on our soil."

A spokesman for Russia’s foreign ministry, Maria Zakharova, called May’s accusation a “circus show in the British Parliament,” according to Russian news agency Interfax.

“The conclusion is obvious: another information and political campaign based on provocation,” Zakharova told reporters, Interfax reported.

Skripal was a retired Russian double agent living in the U.K., convicted in Russia in 2006 for spying for Great Britain and released in 2010 as part of a prisoner swap.

At least 49 killed as passenger jet bursts into flames after landing in Nepal

PlaySaroj Banet

WATCH Jet at Kathmandu airport catches fire after landing

A passenger jet attempting to land at Kathmandu International Airport in Nepal skidded off a runway, crashed and burst into flames, killing at least 49 people, authorities in Nepal told ABC News.

Twenty-two others were injured in the crash, and some were in critical condition, Nepalese police spokesman Manoj Neupan told ABC News. All of the survivors sustained injuries, the airport's general manager, Raj Chettri, said.

Saroj BanetAuthorities have rescued at least 17 passengers on a flight that landed in Nepal, skipped off the runway and burst into flames, March 12, 2018.

US-Bangla Airlines flight 211 was en route from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and arrived around 2:20 p.m. local time. The Canadian-made Bombardier, a Dash 8 Q400 that seats 78 people, made an "unbalanced" landing, according to Chettri.

It took around 25 minutes to extinguish a fire that engulfed the plane, Sanjiv Gaudam, the director general of Nepal's civil aviation agency said.

Navesh Chitrakar/ReutersWreckage of an airplane is pictured as rescue workers operate at Kathmandu airport, Nepal, March 12, 2018.

The cause of the crash is unclear. The pilot was advised to land from the more typical southern approach but chose to land on the northern side of the airport, according to Gaudam and Chettri.

The plane was carrying 67 passengers and four crew members. Those on board included 33 Nepalese, 32 Bangladeshi, one person from China, and one person from the Maldives, Chettri said.

Saroj BanetAuthorities have rescued at least 17 passengers on a flight that landed in Nepal, skipped off the runway and burst into flames, March 12, 2018.

Hundreds of rescue workers searched the plane's wreckage as the airport remained closed.

Those injured were evacuated to five hospitals in Kathmandu by ambulance and helicopter, authorities said. Eleven of the injured were Nepalese, and the others were foreigners, including at least two Bangladeshis, according to Neupan.

Navesh Chitrakar/ReutersWreckage of an airplane is pictured as rescue workers operate at Kathmandu airport, Nepal, March 12, 2018.

Russia’s president Vladimir Putin in a new documentary film said he gave an order to shoot down a passenger airliner in 2014 that was feared to be hijacked and headed toward the opening ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics. The order was cancelled after it proved to be a false alarm, Putin said.

Speaking in a new two-hour documentary, titled ‘Putin,’ that has been released on Russian social media, Putin said he had been en route to the opening ceremony on Feb. 7, 2014, when he received a call from security officers overseeing the Winter Games in the Black Sea city.

“I was told, 'A plane en route from Ukraine to Istanbul was seized, captors demand landing in Sochi,'” Putin said in the film. He said he asked the officers what the procedure was for such a situation and they replied it was to shoot down hijacked aircraft that threatened the event.

“I told them, 'Act according to the plan,'” Putin said. Five minutes after giving the order, Putin said, he received another call informing him it was a false alarm, a passenger aboard the airliner was drunk and had made threats.

The incident that Putin referred to was known about at the time, though not Putin’s shoot-down order. A drunk Ukrainian man aboard a Turkish Pegasus Airlines Boeing 737-800 flying from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv to Istanbul had tried to force the plane’s pilots to divert toward Sochi. In some Russian media reports at the time, the man was said to have shouted, “Bomb!,” and “Let’s fly to Sochi!”

The pilots radioed about the incident and the flight made an emergency landing at an Istanbul airport, arriving safely with the 110 passengers aboard the flight. It was not reported as a major incident at the time.

The documentary, hosted by a senior journalist from Russian state television, Andrey Kondrashov, has been released ahead of the country’s presidential election on March 18. In the softball interview, Putin polishes the strongman image that he has cultivated throughout his 18-year rule.

“A person in my position does not have the right to show weakness,” Putin told Kondrashov.

Kondrashov asks Putin if there is anything that he cannot forgive. Putin replied, “Betrayal.”

But the Russian leader added that he hasn’t ever encountered any “serious events, which it would be possible to call betrayal.”

The journalist asked, “They were just afraid to betray you?”

“Hard to say," Putin answered. "Maybe I chose such people who aren’t capable of that.”

Putin’s comments about betrayal come amid widespread suspicion that the Kremlin ordered the nerve-gas poisoning of a former Russian double agent in Britain last week. British officials have hinted heavily that they believe authorization for the attack on the ex-spy, Sergey Skripal, likely came from Russia, and British media have reported that the U.K. government is preparing retaliatory measures against Moscow.

Russian officials have denied involvement, but Russian state media have made veiled threats toward “traitors” since the attack. An anchor on Russia’s main evening news broadcast on Channel 1 last week warned “traitors” to avoid Britain, noting, “There have been too many strange incidents. People get hanged, poisoned, they die in helicopter crashes and fall out of windows in industrial quantities.”

In the documentary Putin also talked about his grandfather’s work as a chef for Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator.

He “was a cook at Lenin's and later at Stalin’s, at one of the dachas in the Moscow area," Putin said in the film. The story that Putin’s grandfather, Spiridon Putin, had been a chef for Stalin was already known. The film said Spiridon Putin cooked for other members of the Soviet establishment until not long before his death in 1965 at the age of 86, Reuters reported.

At least 39 killed as passenger jet bursts into flames after landing in Nepal

PlaySaroj Banet

WATCH Jet at Kathmandu airport catches fire after landing

A passenger jet attempting to land at Kathmandu International Airport in Nepal skidded off a runway, crashed and burst into flames, killing at least 39 people, the airport's general manager told ABC News.

Of the 71 people on board, at least 27 people survived. All sustained injuries, some critical, the general manager, Raj Chettri, said.

Saroj BanetAuthorities have rescued at least 17 passengers on a flight that landed in Nepal, skipped off the runway and burst into flames, March 12, 2018.

US-Bangla Airlines flight 211 was en route from Dhaka, Bangladesh, and arrived around 2:20 p.m. local time. The Canadian-made Bombardier, a Dash 8 Q400 that seats 78 people, made an "unbalanced" landing, according to Chettri.

It took around 25 minutes to extinguish a fire that engulfed the plane, Sanjiv Gaudam, the director general of Nepal's civil aviation agency, told ABC News.

Navesh Chitrakar/ReutersWreckage of an airplane is pictured as rescue workers operate at Kathmandu airport, Nepal, March 12, 2018.

The cause of the crash is unclear. The pilot was advised to land from the more typical southern approach but chose to land on the northern side of the airport, according to Gaudam and Chettri.

The plane was carrying 67 passengers and four crew members. Those on board included 33 Nepalese, 32 Bangladeshi, one person from China, and one person from the Maldives, Chettri said.

Saroj BanetAuthorities have rescued at least 17 passengers on a flight that landed in Nepal, skipped off the runway and burst into flames, March 12, 2018.

Hundreds of rescue workers searched the plane's wreckage as the airport remained closed.

Those injured were evacuated to hospitals by ambulance and helicopter, according to Chettri. Eight of the 27 pulled from the wreckage alive subsequently died, he said.

Navesh Chitrakar/ReutersWreckage of an airplane is pictured as rescue workers operate at Kathmandu airport, Nepal, March 12, 2018.

WATCH Video captures the moments just before a Russian spy collapsed from poisoning

Since a former Russian double agent and his daughter were poisoned in Britain a week ago, suspicions about Russia's possible handiwork have run high — except in major Russian news outlets, where fingers point in the other direction.

Sergei Skripal, a former officer in Russia's military intelligence service GRU who was convicted in Russia of spying for Britain, and his adult daughter were found comatose on March 4 in the English town of Salisbury, where he lived after being freed in a 2010 spy swap.

While in the West, suspicions about who could be responsible have landed on Russia, in that country the response has been very different.

"If you think about it, well, the only ones for whom the poisoning of the ex-GRU colonel is advantageous are the British," Dimtry Kiselev, one of Russia's most powerful media figures, said during his Sunday news program.

The British motive? "Simply in order to feed their Russophobia," Kiselev posited.

Kiselev's weekly show on state-owned TV channel Rossiya-1, a mixture of admiring coverage of President Vladimir Putin and insinuations of Western deviousness and incompetence, is regarded here primarily as a voice of the Kremlin.

His segment about Skripal was in sync with a reflexive response of Russian officials to attribute nearly all criticism from the West to anti-Russia bias. The sense of Russia as the target of prejudice that unscrupulous politicians work to cultivate is a key element of Putin's popularity as he seeks a fourth term in a March 4 election.

Former special services agent Mikhail Lyubimov was quoted in Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of Russia's most popular newspapers, as suggesting Skripal wouldn't have been worth the trouble of a hit.

"Skripal was sent to the West in a swap; that means he's absolutely uninteresting to us. He's a small-fry," Lyubimov said.

Komsomolskaya Pravda struck an almost facetious tone in the story.

"In Foggy Albion, the latest spy scandal with anti-Russian tones has ripened," it began. The article included a colorful Russian idiom for unfair accusations in a line that read, "It's obvious that, following the old tradition, all dogs will be hung on Moscow."

Russian media aimed at foreign readers have adopted the same tone of resentment and mockery as news outlets for domestic audiences.

"The British are well-known for their dramatic flair when it comes to stories of Cold War espionage and murder mystery. Think Ian Fleming, John Le Carre and Agatha Christie," said a commentary on Sputnik News, a state-run English-language news site.

"But this week's episode of a former Russian spy being poisoned on a public park bench in a quaint English town has suspiciously a tad too much drama about it."

On Sunday, Kiselev suggested a possible connection between the poisonings in Salisbury, which British officials said resulted from exposure to an unspecified nerve agent, and international soccer's upcoming World Cup tournament. Russia winning the right to host the competition that runs from mid-June until mid-July is one of the accomplishments Putin can point to in his re-election campaign.

Kiselev suggested the poisoning could be a "special operation" aimed at justifying a boycott of the tournament.

Skripal wasn't much use to Britain as an exposed ex-spy, but "as someone who's been poisoned, who is ill, he's very useful," Kiselev said.

The program included an on-the-ground report from Britain. The reporter noted that Salisbury, the town where Skripal was lived and fell sick, is about a 20-minute drive from the Porton Down laboratories where Britain developed chemical and bacteriological agents.

"But in the British press and special services, there is no suspicion" of any British involvement, said reporter Alexander Khabarov.

On another state television station, Channel One, anchorman Kirill Klemeinov began a report on the case balefully. He had a public service warning, Klemeinov said, for anyone who dreamed of a career that followed in Skripal's footsteps.

"The profession of a traitor is one of the most dangerous in the world," he said. "It's very rare that those who chose it have lived in peace until a ripe old age.

"Alcoholism, drug addiction, stress and depression are inevitable professional illnesses of a traitor, resulting in heart attacks and even suicide," Klemeinov said.